Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic casts into sharp relief a number of questions relating to reparations. In particular, the COVID-19 crisis highlights the medical vulnerability of the Black community, illustrating the very real physical harm caused by slavery and racism in the United States. At the same time, government responses to the crisis demonstrate the ability to distribute money to large...
Abolishing Racist Policing With the Thirteenth Amendment
This Essay is also forthcoming in our print edition. Abstract Policing in America has always been about controlling the Black body. Indeed, modern policing was birthed and nurtured by white supremacy; its roots are found in slavery. Policing today continues to protect and serve the racial hierarchy blessed by the Constitution itself. But a string of U.S. Supreme Court rulings involving the...
Racist Stereotype Threat in Civil Rights Law
Abstract Racist stereotype threat (RST) describes a concern experienced by many people in interactions which are racially fraught: It arises when a person anticipates being evaluated, or sees an ingroup member being evaluated, in light of a stereotype that their group is racist. Because white people are more likely to anticipate being stereotyped as racist, RST is particularly common for white...
Antitrust as Allocator of Coordination Rights
Abstract The reigning antitrust paradigm has turned the notion of competition into a talisman, even as antitrust law in reality has functioned as a sorting mechanism to elevate one species of economic coordination and undermine others. Thus, the ideal state idea of competition and its companion, allocative efficiency, have been deployed to attack disfavored forms of economic coordination, both...
Class Actions as a Check on LAPD: What Has Worked and What Has Not
Abstract This Comment analyzes class actions brought against the Los Angeles Police Department to examine how effective class actions are as a tool for reforming police practices, and how they can be improved. To determine the effectiveness of class actions, I compare the remedies obtained in class actions to the claims brought in later cases with similar facts; specifically, I focus on whether...
Voter Identification and the Forgotten Civil Rights Amendment: Why the Court Should Revive the Twenty-Fourth Amendment
Abstract Since Reconstruction, states have passed laws to limit the power of those traditionally not permitted to vote (i.e. not white men). These barriers on the right to vote include, inter alia, the payment of poll taxes, which were often required months in advance of an election. In 1964, prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, three-quarters of the States...
Decarbonization in Democracy
Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that democracy is structurally ill equipped to confront climate change. As the story goes, because each of us tends to dismiss consequences that befall people in other places and in future times, the people cannot be trusted to craft adequate decarbonization policies designed to reduce present-day, domestic carbon emissions. Accordingly, U.S. climate change...
#MeToo's Unseen Frontier: Law Enforcement Sexual Misconduct and the Fourth Amendment Response
Abstract If a police officer pulls a person over for running a stop sign, the Fourth Amendment clearly applies. But if he sexually assaults a person in her home, in a noninvestigative setting, it generally does not. A substantive due process test—whether the officer’s conduct “shocks the conscience”—controls instead. This means more constitutional protection for officers and less for victims...